Trump's ex-lawyer: Created false information with AI
Trump's ex-lawyer Cohen was sentenced to prison in 2018 for the misuse of campaign donations. The lawyer wants the case to be closed. In court, the 57-year-old now states that he fabricated false information with the help of a chatbot.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has admitted in court that he used artificial intelligence to generate false information and passed it on to his lawyer. The 57-year-old used the Google chatbot Bard to find evidence for a court case in New York that the software had made up. This emerges from newly published documents from the federal court in Manhattan, in which Cohen justifies his behavior.
Cohen told the court in a published affidavit that he was unaware that Google Bard was a text generator similar to ChatGPT. Cohen admitted his mistake after the judge in the case asked for an explanation on a total of three cited cases that the judge could not find.
Cohen had pleaded guilty to violations relating to the use of campaign donations for Trump in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison, but was allowed to serve part of the sentence in house arrest due to the coronavirus pandemic. The erroneous information has now been included in Cohen's request to the court to file the case.
It remains to be seen whether the episode will have an impact on the current trial against former President Donald Trump. Cohen has testified there as a key witness and is repeatedly portrayed as untrustworthy by the Trump defense.
The new AI programs have immense capabilities - but the way they are programmed makes them susceptible to "hallucinating" supposed facts. Even before Cohen, there had been cases of lawyers who wanted to make their work easier with AI chatbots, but ended up providing false information.
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In his affidavit, Michael Cohen mentioned using Google's chatbot Bard, similar to ChatGPT, to generate false information for a court case. Despite Cohen's past conviction for misusing campaign donations in connection with Donald Trump in the USA, the impacts of this AI-related incident on Trump's current trial remain unclear.
Source: www.ntv.de
